Museums and the Power of Absence: Agrippa (A Book of the Dead)

Whilst museums tend to emphasise authenticity, presence, and permanence, this chapter uses Agrippa (A Book of the Dead) to demonstrate that the fascination of museums lies in différance, erasures, and deferral. Agrippa, published by Ashbaugh, Gibson, and Begos in 1992, is a ‘hybrid object’, constituted of digital and physical components. It is presented and described here as an agent of iconoclasm and taphonomy for both the museum and its objects. Utilising Agrippa alongside the concept of museum eleatetics, spectrality, and absurdity, the chapter concludes that a fixation on authenticity, presence, and permanence elides the transience and abyssal nature of the museum, and thus diminishes its power to actively, and radically, care for the present.